You can build it and have a look but it's hardly different from the one above.

Even though I didn't finish a minigame, I'm really pleased with the result. If I were to do more work on it, I'd definitely want to make an editor because typing the coordinates into a .plist takes a lot of time.

Some things learned:

1. Chipmunk works great as in a simple FPS-style game. Vertical motion obviously has to be handled separately, but with a bit more refinement it could easily be as good as, say, Duke Nukem.

2. gluTesselator does a nice, fast job of dealing with non-convex polygons. It's a bit tricky to work with the output when you're not drawing straight to OpenGL though.

3. Not having to work with image files and models helped to get me started much more quickly. OneSadCookie's NSViewTexture was a big help getting some decoration in there.

I also learned about 3D cameras, stencil buffers, clip planes, and all sorts of new (to me) OpenGL stuff.

So thanks for the motivation, looking forward to seeing what anyone else comes up with. And thanks to everyone who helped/encouraged me on IRC too.

Basically, your base (made of circles) has been invaded by a swarm of circle enemies that are destroying your circular power cores. When they destroy the last power core, it creates a time rift, sending you back to a few seconds before the last core is destroyed. If you can save that core and yourself, time will warp again and give you a chance to save the next core as well. This continues happening until you've saved all the power cores.

WASD to move, space to fire. Save the big circles from the little circles. The game will freeze up for a bit every time that it has to "rewind" time. This is because it's actually just running the game forward from the start as fast as it can until it reaches the target time. Never got around to caching the state so it would only have to do it once at startup.

I have to say, that description of the gameplay really doesn't match my experience.

What appears to happen is, I shoot some of the things for an arbitrary amount of time, after which the game says "Power Core 2 Saved!", beachballs for some time, and then puts me in an arbitrary place in the level with enemies some arbitrary distance "behind" me in the spiral. Rinse, repeat ad infinitum.

Well, time is supposed to be jumping around you so you are not moving, but everything else is. Each jump, a new power core should appear that is about to be destroyed.

The idea seems sort of neat, but the execution was a bit rushed. I didn't feel we really had enough time explore it enough. Oh well, we only spent a day on it though. As is, it's certainly pretty confusing.

Yeah, I think nothing is really terribly clear in what we slapped together. I threw in that narrative text last minute, but it does not quite cut it. I think a few losing conditions regarding losing power cores might not be in there.

I think the core idea works- if it was illustrated better, especially if we could animate time going backwards. It would be more clear. You can't really tell that the time jumps are bringing you back further, it's just not clear.

In actuality, you are jumping back in time by leaps and then playing forward the length of that time. This is kind of neat in that you are defeating the same wave of enemies several times, just earlier in time. You're beating back a legion through time.